The Health and Care system faces unprecedented challenges and needs modernisation to be fit for purpose. Caring for patients with long term conditions for over 20 years, has provided insights into the fragmented  and variable quality of care our patients frequently experience. This has highlighted the urgent need to integrate health and care systems and the opportunity to embrace and harness the technology revolution to reimagine the way we innovate and deliver services, never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Digital, remains the golden thread to enable and sustain such transformational change. We need to future-proof our health and care system, by focusing on the health and wellbeing of both ours and our children’s generation to deliver effective population health management.

Health and Care Organisations are now adopting a new direction of travel away from siloed organisational thinking towards intentionally redesigning the health and care landscape together. This will focus on the need for improved data quality, integrated information systems, patient portals and the role of AI in facilitating new ways of working.

But, more critically we need compassionate, collaborative leadership, blended together with partnership with our citizens and engaged and empowered patients to ensure we meet their care needs and reduce prevailing inequalities both in access and care. This will enable truly integrated care and the move away from transactional outputs towards values and outcomes based, compassionate care.